Plaintiffs hardly ever win medical malpractice cases that go all the way to a jury verdict, and only 4.5% of claims filed ever go that far, researchers said.

Plaintiffs hardly ever win medical malpractice cases that go all the way to a jury verdict, and only 4.5% of claims filed ever go that far, researchers said.

Of those that do get to a jury, 79.6% of the verdicts favor the physician, a team led by Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston found.

Their analysis of more than 10,000 closed malpractice claims from around the U.S. indicated that, overall, 54.1% of those ending up in court were dismissed and the remainder were settled, they reported online in a research letter in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

But cases don't close quickly. The mean time to resolve a malpractice claim was 19 months -- 25.1 months for those that were litigated in court and 11.6 months for those settled without judicial involvement, and much longer for cases that progressed to a verdict.

Claims won by the physician took 39 months before a verdict; those the plaintiff won took 43.5 months.

"While most claims were ultimately decided in a physician's favor, that resolution came only after months or years," Jena and colleagues wrote.

The researchers had data on outcomes of 10,056 malpractice claims closed from 2002 to 2005, that involved some defense costs. They broke down the data according to the defendants' specialties in eight groups:

Internal medicine and subspecialties

Anesthesiology

General surgery and subspecialties

Diagnostic radiology

Ob/gyn

Pediatrics

Pathology

Other

Nearly half the claims (44.8%) overall did not progress to litigation.

Pathologists, on the other hand, had court cases dismissed only 36.5% of the time and about 50% were settled without a verdict. Preverdict settlements were also reached in nearly half of cases involving pediatricians.

"The substantial portion of litigated claims that are not dismissed in court and the length of time required to resolve litigated claims more generally may help explain why malpractice claims undergoing litigation are an important source of concern to physicians," Jena and colleagues wrote.

Last year, the same research group reported that most physicians in some specialties face malpractice claims at some point in their careers, although nearly 80% fail to pay off for plaintiffs.

More recently, Jena and colleagues wrote that physicians hit with malpractice suits spent an average of $23,000 defending themselves, again varying with the outcome and the physician's specialty.

The authors reported no financial conflicts of interest.

Several co-authors received grants from the National Institute on Aging (NIA).

One co-author received an additional grant from the NIA Roybal Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

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